LOVE...Honestly

It's easy to talk about God from a safe place. You know, a place where you don't have to be really honest. You just talk about him and the things you know about him. It gets more difficult when you're forced to be perfectly honest about what he's doing in your heart. This is the place where I find myself right now. 

I've been a Christian for forty years and in ministry for thirty five years. After all that time, I haven't stopped learning new things from God. Some of those things are stuff I should have learned a long time ago, but I found it difficult to change my way of thinking and my attitudes to really learn the basic lesson. I'm talking about a very basic Christian value taught by Jesus, in fact commanded by Him. I've had to come to grips with the fact that I'm not good at loving people.

Jesus told us to love one another so that those who are not believers will know that we are followers of Christ. The apostle John said "In this world, we are like Jesus." It is absolutely a foundation of the Christian faith to love one another. Yet I struggle with it. But God in his faithfulness comes to me, touches my heart, and shows me once again that I am in great need. My need is to love others as Jesus has loved me. After all my years of loving Jesus and doing his will, I must be honest and say that I don't understand how to love even my brothers and sisters in Christ, let alone my neighbors and my enemies.

I know that I am to love others by laying down my life as Christ has laid his life down for me. But it seems so difficult. Would I actually die for a friend? But when I really look at it, Jesus laid down his life for me in many ways. He taught the message of love and lived it all of his days on earth. Even when he wanted to be by himself, he was compelled to touch people with the love of the Father. On the day when he ended up miraculously feeding five thousand men along with their families, he was actually trying to get away to be alone. But when he saw the crowd, he loved them. Compelled by that love, he taught them, fed them, and showed them the personality of the Father.

I think laying down my life for others may be a simple matter. Maybe, like Jesus did, if I could allow myself to be inconvenienced and interrupted by people, I could actually show love to them like Jesus did. I'm always focused on the task, dead set on following my agenda. What if I just let myself get interrupted? What if I allowed people to be more important than my plan? Maybe then I would actually be like Jesus, laying down my life in my community and my church.

When the folks in the world look at the church, I think they wonder what this is all about. They see factions, arguments, holier than thou attitudes, hypocrisy, and general weirdness. What if we came together and just loved each other? What if we served one another out of the love that God has placed in our hearts? Do you think others might notice and think that it's good? I do! When we strip away all the stuff that we think is Christianity, it boils down to this simple truth; Love each other. I think it's the truth for me anyway...honestly.